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NYC’s cult duo White Hills, known for their role in Jim Jarmusch’s critically acclaimed vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive, open minds with their sonic alchemy- a hypnotic mix of neo-psychedelia, art rock, and darkwave- euphoric & transcendent. Born & rooted in Gotham, Dave W (guitar/vocals/synths) & Ego Sensation (drums/bass/vocals) drink the energy and inspiration from the urban scape, with its rich rock & roll history, instilling their sound with the city’s unmistakable heartbeat. Their 2025 release on Thrill Jockey Records, Drop Out III, hit the Official UK Charts with Backseat Mafia declaring it “a benchmark in contemporary psychedelia”. Just months earlier, their 2024 album Beyond This Fiction received four-star ratings from Mojo & Record Collector with Complex Distractions declaring it one of the best albums of the year.
Since their 2004 self-titled debut, Pink Mountaintops have supplied an outlet for the more arcane fascinations of Black Mountain frontman Stephen McBean. On Peacock Pools—Pink Mountaintops’ first new music in eight years—the British Columbia-born singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist shares 12 songs sparked from his magpie-like curiosity for a wild expanse of cultural artifacts: the sci-fi body horror of David Cronenberg, Disney Read-Along Records from the 1970s, early Pink Floyd and mid-career Gary Numan, John Carpenter movies, Ornette Coleman live videos, a 1991 essay on the cult of bodybuilding by postmodern feminist Camille Paglia. Featuring counterculture icons like Steven McDonald of Redd Kross and Dale Crover of Melvins, Peacock Pools alchemizes those obsessions into a body of work with its own enchanting power, the sonic equivalent of falling down a thousand rabbit holes at once and landing somewhere gloriously strange.
If Black Mountain represents the darker side of singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Stephen McBean's musical thinking, Pink Mountaintops is a vehicle for his brighter and more engaging ideas. While both bands share McBean's fondness for trippy, psych-infused sounds, Pink Mountaintops avoid the doom-inspired tone of Black Mountain to make room for a wider range of musical influences, matched to lyrics that playfully deal with his various obsessions, from favorite musicians to the edges of teen culture. McBean and his collaborators merged lo-fi production and arrangements with dashes of lysergic Americana on their 2004 self-titled debut and 2006's Axis of Evol. 2014's Get Back filtered McBean's melodic ideas through muscular rock guitars, and 2022's Peacock Pools made room for folk, pop, vintage electronics, and classic rock overtones.
Meet Motherfuckers JMB & Co! J is for Jim, M is for Marc, B is for Brian. Motherfuckers is for...well, you'll have to hear that for yourself. You might get an idea pretty quick once you're spinning Music Excitement Action Beauty. The trio's first full-length is a rocket of rhythm and atmosphere that fearlessly treks into vast sonic spaces. Drumbeats spread into constellations, bass pumps air into the sky, drones flare into clouds. Thick grooves drift in and out of focus, but there's always a central force to cling to as all the vapor-trails shoot past.
Decades of musical archaeology lurk behind this rainbow-hued swirl of psych, drone, improvisation, and ritual. Brian Weitz (hurdy gurdy) has spent 25 years crafting sound as Geologist in the ground-breaking quartet Animal Collective. Jim Thomson (drums) has been in scores of bands, from helping found Richmond art-metal legends GWAR, to jamming instrumentals in SST alums Alter-Natives (a fitting forebear to JMB's vocal-less jaunts), to driving the spirited dance-punk of Time Is Fire. Marc Minsker (bass, guitar, harmonium) has made music since the early 90s, initially in Third Eye Lounge (who backed legendary improviser Eugene Chadbourne), and later in myriad partnerships around the mid-Atlantic region.
The trio came together via old-fashioned community, in the always-fertile ground of the DC/Maryland/Virginia experimental scene. In 2018, Minsker and Weitz met at a mutual friend's birthday party. Bonding over shared obsessions (Sun City Girls, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282), they soon guested on each other's radio shows (Minsker at WOWD in Takoma Park, MD, Weitz on NTS in cyberspace) and traded creative ideas. In 2023, they performed together for the first time: Minsker on harmonium and Weitz on hurdy gurdy, both shrouded by a hanging tapestry.